Extensões do Corpo (Bodily Extentions)

In Extensões do Corpo (Bodily Extentions), Adriana Barreto revisits her fundamental themes: the body, how it adjusts to space and how it generates space; the processes through which body expands space and expands itself in space through movement.

The video has its origins in a performance at the artist’s studio, with no audience, and performed by a professional dancer. The result was a sequence of circular movements around a group of spherical sculptures holding the body to the ground. This set of movements—as circular as a ritournelle—were afterwards mixed with sound; a composition for drums, performed by Bruno Pedroso over the edited version of the video. The dry and scratching sounds, imperfect, necessarily loud and enveloping—and coming from the opposite side of the images—contrast with the image’s soft circular language while, at the same time, reinforcing the circular character of the ritournelle’s structure, as it—in a different mode—brings us back to the same place.

The performance (the third moment of this work) is a modified version of the one presented in the video. The work becomes more complex through the incorporation of more elements, through the dilution of the space of action and the space of the viewer, who faces an ambiguous invitation to participate in the show. It is complexified by the multiplication of space, and by its deconstruction, which is operated by two large mirrored surfaces the same size as the screen on which the video is projected. (Extract from the text by curator Delfim Sardo)